How General Assembly Used Lifecycle Management to Improve Leads

Elizabeth Trombino

Elizabeth Trombino

Did you know that aggressive personalization efforts increase a company’s top-line revenue by 6 to 10? Many marketers do and as a result, are making progress on their personalization efforts through email and website recommendations. General Assembly, the global education company that teaches tech skills to both individuals and companies, also knows that the biggest potential lies in personalizing the entire customer lifecycle.

With a business centered on content+commerce, General Assembly boasts a community of 70,000+ learners and career-changers, in addition to a network of more than 19,000 hiring partners. However, with a lean (but mighty) marketing team, General Assembly hasn’t always had the resources to fully optimize their email program to engage all of them. Then they started working with Sailthru in 2016.

Moving From Manual to Marketing Automation

General Assembly’s email workflow has traditionally been very manual. Local teams would send pre-course assignments to new students one-by-one. This was incredibly time-consuming for the company and inconsistent for the students, given how much the experience varied from one geographic market to another.

General Assembly works in 19 cities around the world, from Sydney to Stamford. That many regions, in addition to countless user interests and behaviors, can create a logistical nightmare of segmentation.

“Given that many of our customers have a long consideration window and lifecycle — from initial curiosity to lead to student to alumnus — it’s been a perennial challenge to connect those moments together and figure out the best way to nurture and engage along the way,” says Greg Mortimer, General Assembly’s Director of Email Marketing + CRM. “Lifecycle Optimizer has opened up some powerful doors to let us test into meaningful solutions.”

Designed with fully-integrated artificial intelligence, Lifecycle Optimizer enabled General Assembly to automate their email marketing. It saved time for the company while allowing them to reach more people. Additionally, it saved frustration for the students, resulting in a drop in cancellation and withdrawal rates.

Lifecycle Optimizer Flows and Leads

Leads are the core of General Assembly’s consumer business, which makes multi-touch communication flows of the utmost importance. Lifecycle Optimizer flows — the company has more than 100 — are built to personalize the customer lifecycle, responding to specific behaviors. These flows better position General Assembly to frame their value propositions with the right content. As a result, product marketing has improved, increasing leads for their highest-value full-time career accelerators by 12%.

How else has Lifecycle Optimizer enabled General Assembly to improve lead generation with a more personalized customer experience? For one, they target people who viewed pages with browse abandonment flows to drive more lead generation. Additionally, General Assembly segments onboarding flows based on acquisition source, a very complicated and manual process before.

Knowing how someone found them and nurturing that person accordingly is crucial for maximum engagement. If someone has a lower customer lifetime value, General Assembly uses more awareness-building during the early stages of that relationship. Working with Sailthru, the company also found that awareness-building content correlates with a 40% in leads from users we acquire through sweepstakes.

For more information on how Sailthru can help you achieve your team’s marketing goals, click here for a demo.